| OPTIMAL OPTIMUS
(MICROMASTER)
PROJECT #92
CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
TOY PARTS USED: MINDWIPE (VORATH COMPONENT); SWINDLER, TAILSPIN (AUTOBOT
RACE CAR PATROL); STORM CLOUD, NIGHTFLIGHT (DECEPTICON AIR STRIKE PATROL);
HOOK (WEAPONS).
MATERIALS USED: HOBBY KNIFE, SUPER GLUE, SEWING PIN, ENAMEL PAINTS
FIRST APPEARANCE: "OPTIMAL SITUATION" (BEAST WARS)
"There he is, my little guy..."
Preamble: This project was inspired
by Blue-Jackal, once a regular poster to alt.toys.transformers. She
was infamous for having a very large and very silly newsgroup signature,
which at one point mentioned that her most desired Transformers toy was a
Micromaster version of Optimal Optimus. Well, that sounded like a fun
idea for a project, so I dug through my toy box for old Micromasters I could
cobble together.
Most of the toys I used were either broken or
otherwise ruined beyond repair. I had a spare Vorath that I'd defaced
with a silver ink pen when I was a kid, so he became the base figure. I'd
colored Swindler with a permanent marker to try to turn him into Micromaster
Bluestreak, plus his arms were broken off anyway, so he donated his arms,
chest plate, and rear wheels. Storm Cloud was another toy I'd colored
with markers in an attempt to turn him into Micromaster Starscream, so I
used his wings, stabilizers, forearms, and rear wheels. The tabs on
either side of Nightflight's jet-mode cockpit were broken off, so I used
that as well. There wasn't actually anything wrong with my Tailspin
toy, but he was the only Micromaster I owned who had an Optimalesque face.
For the weaponry, I cannibalized two pistols that originally belonged
to Hook of the Constructicons.
Construction: I kept the full-sized Optimal
Optimus toy close at hand during this project, referring to both his robot
and jet forms frequently while fitting the Micromaster parts together. (I
decided to go with the jet mode as the alternate form, since the robot mode
was going to have wings on the arms anyway.) After dismantling each
toy and removing the parts I needed, I started by chopping off the front
of Swindler's vehicular hood and gluing Nightflight's jet cockpit to it.
(Since the Tailspin head was a little larger than Swindler's, I had
to carve out the groove in his chest a bit more so he could transform fully.)
I wanted to retain both Vorath's leg articulation
and Swindler's flip-up chest, so I grafted the relevant Swindler parts to
Vorath's body, carving out a groove in the top of Vorath's chest to accommodate
the chest hinge. I also wanted to work Swindler's car-mode roof into
the figure since it was the right size to mount the guns in place, but I
knew gluing it in place would mean it'd pop off every time I touched it,
so I took a drill and bored a hole through the center of Vorath's stomach
to match up with the screw mount on the inside of Swindler's roof.
Screwing the parts together had the added benefit of reinforcing the
structural integrity of Vorath's body, which was hollow and quite fragile
by this point.
I wanted his arms to have a more stable connection
point than those fragile little Micromaster arm pegs, so I ended up using
Swindler's rear wheels themselves as the arm joints, gluing them to the body
while still allowing for a full range of motion. I actually attached
Swindler's arms backwards, so that the wheels wouldn't be clearly visible
in robot mode, but his arms could still be swung around for the transformation,
fists forward, with the wheels touching the ground in this form. I
did replace Swindler's puny forearms with Storm Cloud's much larger,
robotic-looking ones.
After carefully chopping Storm Cloud's wings off,
I glued the larger ones to the sides of the new arms (making sure not to
glue the entire wing, so they would retain the ability to fold). The
smaller stabilizers were glued to the backs of Vorath's legs, after scoring
a groove for each of them to rest in. The last pair of wheels were
likewise glued to Vorath's legs. I also wanted him to have animal-like
toes in robot mode, so I took the missile launchers mounted on either side
of Tailspin's head and glued them to the ends of Vorath's toes.
For the guns, I chopped off the handles and most
of the sticky-out parts from the Hook guns, glued the tops of them
together, and glued one of the posts to the middle of the new weapon. I
then drilled a hole in the middle of the Swindler roof so the gun could be
removed. (The toy can't hold it as a handheld weapon or anything, but
I thought the idea of a Micromaster with an accessory was neat.)
All that remained was to paint the toy. I
tried to stay pretty much with the color scheme of the Optimal Optimus toy,
although I had to fudge a couple of parts that OpOp doesn't have, like the
chest panel. I mixed a little bit of silver paint into each color to
give it a more metallic look, but I went with the yellow colors from
the show (and the prototype pictured on the packaging) rather than the orange
that the finished toy has. I had to paint the face with a sewing pin
because it's so freakin' tiny.
To transform him, the wings unfold, the chest
plate flips up, the arms swing up 180º, and the legs pivot up slightly.
He rolls freely in this form, and the guns swivel (and can be
removed).
Comments: This project took a while
to put together, since I had to spend a lot of time whittle away at a piece,
test-fitting the parts, whittling away a bit more, etc. I think it
was worth it, though. I've always been very proud of this little
thing. |
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